Microsoft's Bing Grabs 12.7% of Search Marketshare
The BBC is reporting that research from ComScore indicates Bing has grapped as much as 12.7% of the search market. Microsoft just launch Bing a year ago. The study also found that Google has 62.6% and Yahoo has 18.9%.
Satya Nadello of Microsoft's online division told BBC News they are in it to win. Nadello said, "We have barely gotten into double digits but we want this to grow into a significant business for Microsoft. It is a huge market where there is a significant profit pool that can be achieved. But we definitely wouldn't be in it if we were not going to play to win."
Posted on July 14, 2010
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Bing Closing Bing Cashback
Bing has announed they are ending the Bing cashback feature.
Why are we doing this? When we originally began to offer the cashback feature, it was designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing.The last day of Bing cashback will be July 30.
In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.
Posted on June 30, 2010
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Microsoft Losing Browser Marketshare
The BBC reports that Internet Explorer continues to lose marketshare. The latest report has IE's marketshare below 60%. Firefox has 24.5% and Google Chrome has 6.7%. The BBC says a Nielsen report gives IE a larger marketshare of 70%. Here is the breakdown of browser marketshare from the NetApplications reports.
- Internet Explorer - 59.9%
- Firefox - 24.5%
- Chrome - 6.7%
- Safari - 4.7%
- Opera - 2.3%
- Opera Mini - 0.7%
- Netscape - 0.46%
- Mozilla - 0.16%
- Flock - 0.06%
- Lunascape - 0.04%
Posted on May 22, 2010
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Teens Flock to Anonymous Formspring.me Website
Webware reports that teens are flocking to a website called Formspring.me. The site facilitates the posting of anonymous questions. Webware says the company claims it received 50 million unique visitors last month alone.
Since then, it went viral, attracting 50 million unique visitors last month, according to the company. Thanks to the service's success, the company is now bringing its offices to San Francisco after receiving $2.5 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors. Among the investors are Digg founder Kevin Rose and former Facebook executive Dave Morin.The anonymous nature of the website can also lead to harassment and abuse. A support faq about the website says, "Unfortunately, there are people that misuse the system and abuse anonymity to harass others. Since formspring.me launched, we've been working on finding the right set of tools and options for users to protect themselves from abuse, while keeping room for all the positive things that can come from using formspring.me."
The Web site is currently in its infancy; it has no revenue model or API. However, it does have the elements needed to attract, engage, and retain users around the globe, especially Generation Y.
Posted on April 10, 2010
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Yahoo Turns 15
Yahoo is celebrating its 15th birthday. Maggie Rodriguez spoke with Yahoo's Web Life editor Heather Cabot to see much the internet has changed our lives. Heather Cabot says the survey found that most people in 1995 were clueless about the Internet in 1995. Today, most people use the Internet for letter writing, find recipes and get the news. Take a look:Posted on March 8, 2010
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iTunes Preview Lets You Browse Apps in Web Browser
TechCrunch reports that iTunes now lets you view iPhone/iPod Touch apps in the browser. You can see an example of this here with Sunset Lake Software's Pi Cubed app. This is great because it keeps the iTunes application from opening and slowing things down. This should have been done a long time ago.Posted on February 4, 2010
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Apple iPad Will Not Read Flash
Apple's iPad promises an amazing web surfing experience but there is a major downside that makes the surfing experience less amazing: no Flash. Flash is used for many videos on the Internet. Many games also use Flash. The lack of Flash is especially frustrating considering the device was billed as a web surfing and entertainment device. Apple even claims the iPad is the "best way to experience the web, email, photos and video. Hands down." But it isn't a good experience at all if you can't experience something because Apple forbids you. The real reason Apple does not want to use Flash is because they want to force iPad owners to buy movies and games from the iTunes stores.
You can find more iPad coverage here.
Posted on January 31, 2010
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Twitter Reportedly Makes a Profit in 2009
Bloomberg is reporting that Twitter is now profitable after providing data for Google's and Microsoft Bing's real time search engines.
An agreement that made Twitter's messages searchable on Google's site will generate about $15 million, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because the terms aren’t public. A similar deal with Microsoft's Bing search engine will earn Twitter about $10 million.$25 million in revenues leaves Twitter well short of its $1 billion evaluation but at least it shows the company is able to generate some revenues.
The multiyear agreements will allow Twitter to make a small profit in 2009, said the people, who estimate that its operating costs are about $20 million to $25 million a year. The San Francisco-based company, which started in 2006, has about 105 employees, according to its Web site.
Posted on December 21, 2009
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Yahoo Testing Real-time Search With One Riot
All the main search engine are launches real-time search these days to compete with Twitter. TechCrunch reports that Yahoo has chosen OneRiot as its real-time search partner. Yahoo says they will use it for some search results and are currently testing it.
Real-time search means different things to different people. For Yahoo!, we think of real-time search in terms of providing the most relevant, fresh information to people every time.OneRiot is a useful tool for searching Twitter. It helps you pull out the most relevant content without getting all the spam and retweets. Search engines need to add filters if they want to improve real-time search over what Twitter's own search engine provides.
Yahoo! Search is currently testing a new search shortcut that will include real-time results at the top of the search results page. The shortcut will only appear on certain queries that will be determined by Yahoo. This is a test designed to discover if showing such content is useful to people using Yahoo! Search. Yahoo! is focused on creating the most innovative, easy-to-use and valuable search experience for people, and after this test we will carefully evaluate whether we should integrate such results for everyone using Yahoo! Search
Posted on November 14, 2009
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Zakta Launches Social Search Engine
Zakta.com is a social web search engine. In addition to traditional searching, Zakta also allows users to edit their search results and build on the results of others.
Here are some of the features Zakta provides according to the press release:
- Fully editable search results. Zakta's search results are completely editable and under the user's control. A user can delete results that aren't relevant. Drag-and-drop results to rearrange them, or add tags and annotations to any result.
- Automatically saved searches. Zakta automatically saves all changes into a user's Zakta account so users benefit from their changes whenever they search again.
- Tools to gather and save information from everywhere. Zakta provides tools like the Zakta ClipPad, the Zakta Plugin, and Zakta SearchPacks, to find information anywhere on the web and include it in the user's search process.
- Easy knowledge sharing. Zakta enables users to share their results in the form of Zakta Guides.
- Trusted collaboration. Users can invite other people they trust - such as colleagues, friends, or family members - to find information together and use a Zakta Guide as a living, collaborative document.
Posted on October 24, 2009
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Google Expands Its Search Options
Google blogs that have expanded the number of search options they offer. The new search options include nine new search options: past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news. You can find them by searching Google and clicking "Show options" in the blue bar just under the logo.
The date option is very useful if you want more timely results. The visited pages feature only works best if you are signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled.
Posted on October 10, 2009
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Microsoft's Bing Launches Visual Search
Bing has a blog post about its new Visual Search feature. They argue that if you are looking for things like an actor you can't remember or a new car sometimes it is easier and smarter to search visually instead of entering text.
Visual Search is a new way to formulate and refine your search queries through imagery, particularly for sets of results that tend to be more structured. We call these data groupings galleries. Simply go to www.bing.com/visualsearch and install Silverlight if you don't have it already. What you'll see is an amazing new visual search experience. Visual Search allows you to quickly scroll through the galleries or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through.Bing has lots of visual search categories available include dog breeds, digital cameras, tv shows, U.S. politicians, MLB teams and yoga poses. You have to install Microsoft Silverlight to use visual search.
Now to find that movie you were looking for, click on "Movies" and scroll through the imagery to find "what's-his-name." Now that you found it, hover your mouse over the movie to view details including title, rating, reviews, and how much it grossed at the box office, all right under the search box. Think about how much time you saved using Visual Search.
Posted on September 27, 2009
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Wikipedia to Add Review Layer to Articles About People
The New York Times reports that the online user-generated encyclopedia called Wikipedia is going to start reviewing changes that can be made to articles about living people. An editorial review layer will be added to articles so that a more experienced editor reviews article changes before they are live on the website.
Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.The article says the new editing procedures are already in place on the German version of Wikipedia. The Times says 60 million people now use Wikipedia each month. The Times notes that editing changes mean some Wikipedia editors will have more clout than others. The big concern is that new editorial review layer could delay important changes to the people articles.
The new feature, called "flagged revisions," will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved - or in Wikispeak, flagged - it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia's leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.
Posted on August 24, 2009
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Know Your Meme: Three Wolf Moon Shirt
This is a meme you should be familiar with. It's the Three Wolf Moon shirt that soared to the top of Amazon.com's clothing sales chart. Hilarious tongue-and-cheek reviews left on Amazon.com's product page allowed the Three Wolf Moon shirt to spread virally around the Internet. A funny song also boosted the shirt's sales. Rocketboom goes in-depth to explain how the shirt became a meme. Take a look:Posted on August 4, 2009
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Yahoo Search to Be Bing Powered
Microsoft and Yahoo have cut a 10-year deal that will see Microsoft's Bing search engine powering Yahoo's search results. Bing has been received positively and has been slowly gaining search marketshare. This probably helped convince Yahoo to do the deal with Microsoft.
The 10-year deal shifts control of Yahoo search results and ads to Microsoft, which will use Yahoo's better-trafficked site as a platform for its new search engine, Bing. Microsoft will pay for the expensive infrastructure it requires to run search technology, freeing up Yahoo's cash for that company's other operations. Microsoft paid no cash up front, and investors think Yahoo got the bum end of the deal - that company's stock plunged 12 percent the day it was announced.Reuters reports that Yahoo is also looking at mining tweets to provide real-time data in addition to search results from Bing. Bing also has a tweet search tools called BingTweets.
The investors are probably right: Unless Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz, can work miracles on Yahoo's other products, the company might regret getting out of the search business. In the long term, Microsoft and Yahoo probably had no choice but to band together against Google, which controls a monstrous share of the search market (nearly 70 percent). But in the short term, it could mean a tough restructuring that affects morale all over Silicon Valley.
Posted on July 31, 2009
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